


Nature Abhors a Vacancy

by Nemonus



Series: Dark!Eriana [1]
Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dark, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 13:44:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6522151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eriana's Fireteam defeats Crota, but just barely. Lost to the Light and fallen willing prey to the sword-logic, Eriana begins to remake the Hive in her own image.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nature Abhors a Vacancy

**Author's Note:**

> “It showed me how it did this, just exactly this, to an Awoken man, the knives arranged by its will, like little silver ships, like Ghosts - It laughed at me. It said we were the same.” 
> 
> "The epithet Son of Oryx is an ambiguous translation, often disputed."

It took Eriana three days to realize what she had inherited.  
  
By then, her team had scattered and been lost. The tunnels had defeated their bruised and blackened bodies the way the prince of the tunnels never could. Hive, Eriana knew, lived on attrition. Something was eating at her, as she lifted her muddy hand to lever herself between two more slick stones.  
  
She was having trouble remembering their names. Quick Sai, sharp-eyed Eris, clever Toland, strong Vell, resilient Omar. They had won. It was Toland who had told her the names of the worms, but it was Eriana who found the mantra of her friends’ names replaced with theirs. Wise Yuul, vicious Eir, regal Akka.  
  
Crota was dead. Eriana had shot him in the throat and stolen his soul.  
  
She had slung it from her back like a bag, and now it whispered to her.  
  
They had won.  
  
The soul had been driving her toward something. It drove her up, always spiraling and switching back in the maw-halls of the moon. She had been lost trying to get back to the Earth and the surface, but was not sure now whether she was being lead there or not. When she encountered a Wizard, she stared at the eyes like holes poked in its flat-planed skull. The Wizard rattled and shook its sleeves at the soul she held. The feeling of the Praxic Fire, drawn from the sun, was missing as if it had been cut out. She could kill the Wizard in a few shots if she had a gun, Eriana thought. She didn't have one.  
  
She got ready to fight it anyway. Curled her fists, ground her top jaw plate against the bottom. If she was going to die in the tunnel, she was going to die in the fight.  
  
The Wizard floated down, crackling. Electric energy hovered in the air, but there was odd silence - usually, with a Wizard came the screamers.  
  
The Wizard bowed to her. She signaled confusion, the messages blasting from her cheek-lights before she could stop them. The Wizard, as if they had spoken the same language, began to teach her things.  
  
Three days in, Eriana had a throne.  
  
And why not? Why not this dark, this green? She had taken the moon alone. (The Worms had taken the moon alone.) There were whispers from the Ascendant Plane, protocols and equations and strange fluctuations, and she had begun to map them. The Praxic Fire, drawn from the sun, had returned to her. She could feel it at a distance now, more attuned to the fusion at the nuclei than to the long bursts at the corona. Deep in the pit, Eriana drew from another sun and touched the Ascendant Plane. In that place, existence was a feedback loop: everything became more of what it believed itself to be.  
  
She heard in the ringing of the Darkness that other tombships might be coming, sending ripples of possibility through the vacuum, sending their song out into the empty black. In this way, Eriana-3 understood that victory was the only conditional for victory.  
  
Wei, she thought, had understood this too, and the thought of Wei was like a blast of cool air in the furnace of Eriana’s own workings. She felt the heat between her fingers, and felt the Earth floating in its orbit beyond the miles and miles of rock beyond her throne. Maybe the Vanguard would forget her when their signals didn’t reach her; maybe the data they sent to the errant, foolish fireteam who went to the moon alone would bounce back, keening, to be eaten and trampled by Hive and Fallen. Poor Vanguard, alone in space. Eriana crossed one leg over the other and conjured fire so bright she had to drop a filter over her vision. The guardians of her throne, the tumorous Ogres and the squalling Thralls, shuffled away, but they were getting used to the light.  
  
She felt the Earth, and thought maybe she could squeeze it in her hand too.

* * *

  
  
When great cats kill one another, they do not let the children live.  
  
Eriana knew the Deathsingers had not been her daughters. She knew that Omnigul was not of her family. Ir Yut was already dead, cut down before the summoning. So she sat on the throne and thought, tapping her fingers, while she watched her guards’ backs drift to her left and to her right.  
  
Sai Mota had been separated from her Ghost when she died - when she embraced mutual death in the arms of Omnigul. The Ghost still lived, though, a faint signal.  
  
Eriana struggled. The Knights and Wizards who guarded her grew restless while she worked her fire, while she made paper from thrall-flesh and wrote on it the equations of Light and Darkness. (She sensed the energy of the Worm in the Thrall, and filed this information away too.) The pit was becoming even more dead, even more flaking, as Eriana-3 bent its sciences to one purpose.  
  
She found the Ghost. Her fire had begun to burn green all the time, so that the pieces she knitted together were bathed in that color too.  
  
She would need to carry it out of the pit in order to revive its Guardian, because she could not fill the hole the Light had left. The Ghost was listless. She set it on the arm of her throne, and when her lieutenants told her of the Hive resolve weakening on the surface of the moon as their connection to the Worm starved and the Deathsingers never sang and the Guardians made exploratory cuts, she listened. As Warlocks do, she made plans.

* * *

  
  
The Worm shied away from her.  
  
Eriana-3 discovered Akka in a cavern heady with the dust and scent of the lesser worms. From this she could reach out into space and feel the pulsating, pustulant words about how its energy reached through the barrier between the world and Crota’s world, and about how it enriched Hive blood. Physically, Akka was far away, knotted up with Oryx in his Dreadnaught. Nevertheless, she discovered it like a revelation.  
  
Eriana had no familial fondness for Oryx.  
  
Neither, she suspected, had Crota.  
  
Instead, they both served the rot that had grown through the family tree, until it was indistinguishable from the tree itself.  
  
As she analyzed the Worm-scent, it invigorated her. It smoothed her gait like oil. She had not been accepted yet, though. There was suspicion in the Hive ranks, but they would succumb to the logic of the sword soon enough. The sword itself had been destroyed, crumbling with its master, but the law remained. In the pit, things became what they were believed to be. Things became, more and more, themselves.  
  
Eriana knew how to work things in her favor.

* * *

  
  
Omar had been fed to the spawn, body and brightness.  
  
There would be no recovering him, although she thought that if she tried, if she squinted into the Light which was becoming more and more alien to her, maybe she could find him. Even his Ghost was gone.  
  
Eriana accepted this. The fuzziness she had felt when thinking of her team was gone: she could remember them now, knife and bone. Omar mocking Toland, Omar comparing the Golden Gun to the Praxic Fire and never seeing - never understanding - the difference. But Omar could laugh, that wet, human sound, white teeth and the Ghost floating by his ear.  
  
Eriana didn’t need vengeance. The fight was cause enough for itself, and besides, they weren’t (all) dead.  
  
She remembered, she insisted, she asserted: her team had won.

* * *

  
Eris and Toland had an advantage.  
  
They could speak, and they could see.  
  
When Eriana found them, Eris embraced her and wept ichor down her back. They had been living in the tunnels, hearing the sea change on the maria.  
  
Eriana let Toland shuffle up to the throne, his hands clasped, swaying. Eriana folded her arms and watched. He hadn’t mourned the Deathsinger, she didn’t think, although she hadn’t been focusing on that while she had been starting to summon Crota. She felt him reach out to the spaces where Ir Yut had been, and _Light,_ the Worms had been waiting for someone to open himself up this much. Toland made of himself a conduit. She followed his awareness, using it to fit together parts of the network of Hive energy that she had not been certain of before. (She had almost forgotten that she lived on a threshold. For all of them, half-reality was real enough now.)  
  
Toland was in awe, already counting on his fingers and proposing words that nipped at the threshold like dogs.  
  
Eris, though.  
  
Eriana moved to her side. Eris had lost her knife and her Ghost; green eyes burned like Toland’s swamp-gas stare. The disdainful curl of her lips was not in service to the Hive’s need for blood, though.  
  
Eris resisted.  
  
She was too suspicious to have ever accepted her life in the tunnels, although desperation had driven her to it. More than any of them, Eris had the ability to remember the mission the team had once been on.  
  
Eris did not think that they had won. Eriana wished to comfort her in this.  
  
The sword-logic didn’t hold with their original mission, even though the Guardians killed and killed and killed; there was too much of the Light in them, and Eriana’s fire took the Dark as oxygen now.  
  
Eriana bent down beside Eris. Whirred for a moment in Eris’ ear before crouching and just watching Toland reach out his hands and feel the air around him, as if already planning where he would glide. He turned his back, riding on invisible currents.  
  
Eriana remembered humanity. She remembered some things, from before.  
  
She muttered, “I’ll give him to you.”

* * *

  
  
Eriana didn’t know what she looked like any more. She kept up her repairs. She would need to work sinew into wire at one point, but she thought of the spine-deep pulse as the fire kicked in, and knew it wouldn’t be difficult.  
  
Eris and Toland were growing horns above their eyes and tiny scutes on their cheeks. So diligently did they grow them! Sometimes they paced, guarding her and clutching their reasons tight. (Eris: loyalty. Toland: ambition.) Sometimes they sat on the ground and leaned on the throne, and stared when she had audiences; with ambitious Wizards, with the lesser worms. She learned to trust their eyes. Sometimes Eris touched Toland’s scabbing lips and fed him the bloody, crumbling food of the Hive. Sometimes, the two of them sang, working out iterations of the death song, almost there.

* * *

  
  
When Eriana touched the dead Ghost, she thought of both Sai and Omar.  
  
She knew that she could bring them back to life, and that she would do it without emerging from the moon and touching the Light. The Light wasn’t theirs any more: they had been submerged too long away from it, and were sea-creatures adhered to the rock now, living inside their exoskeletons. The tiny universe of life and death into which Sai and Omar had been packed was a kernel in that Ghost.  
  
That curiosity was a side project, though, something to worry at like a pearl. The Darkness had not taken her for her friends alone. Eriana wanted to fight.  
  
It would be glorious for the Guardians to continue that fight with her.  
  
When she thought about the Tower she thought about the pit at the same time, as if one were the inverse of the other. Light or Dark? Oryx or Ikora? It made no difference. The Hive felt their exodus in their bones. Thinking about it that way, all of the equations and theorems and applications that had gotten her here, the runes that depended on runes they themselves unlocked for translation, went from frustratingly cryptic to mathematically beautiful.  
  
And the resources she had!  
  
Eriana fed what was left of her own Light to the spawn she had allowed to proliferate, and felt it begin to filter in through the Hive. She felt it transform.

* * *

  
  
Then, Eris left.  
  
Eris cut through the bubble of time and influence that Eriana had almost forgotten. Eriana had lived in the atmosphere of the Hive so long that now it was just something that she breathed, and Eris performed the greatest cruelty of all: she broke the illusion, trailing it behind her like a ship punching through atmosphere. The pit was a threshold, and Eris backed out the door.  
  
Eriana did not know what had motivated her, what had changed. Eris and Toland had both begun to sing the deathsongs, to knit the ropes that would give Eriana and Omar and Sai new life. They had both begun to explore the intersection between the edge-world and the Ascendant Plane beyond. She would have had to pass Tarlowe’s body, freezing at the doorway where he fell.  
  
I shouldn’t have brought a Hunter to the heart of it all, Eriana thought, then flinched back, jarred by her own use of distinctions which meant little in the pit. Eris was Hunter at her core, though, prone to breaking open cages when there weren’t any. Andal had done the same thing: invented walls just so that he could rage against them. Rangy Eris, wandering Eris.  
  
She didn’t understand the things that Eriana and Toland understood. Warlocks would pursue but not dog, needle but not stab. Warlocks questioned, and the Darkness had gentle answers. All written on the barrel of a gun or the ivory of a claw, but the Tower’s answers were all etched on barrels too. The fight was self-proving, self-providing. Existence was a perpetual motion machine, and the Darkness its energy.  
  
Eriana stood up from her throne.  
  
Bits of sinew pulled away from her metal flanks.  
  
She knew the passages now, although they had been built partially to keep things in instead of keeping things out. She was growing, her shoulders widening as she built them out with Acolyte armor and Wizard rags. She was beginning to feel warning twinges of systems made to bear new weight, and these too would need to be replaced. Exos were not unused to recreating themselves, even if they were not Guardians.  
  
Eriana’s shoulder blades had begun to shiver.  
  
The path Eris took was small and dusty. Perhaps she had discovered it even before Eriana rescued her, because at first it proceeded downward, winding past Thrall nests and skirting places where the Hive were building new vaulted spaces. Later, though, the path narrowed enough that Eriana had to lower her head and tear chunks out of the rock in order to move forward. Eris must have had to turn sideways here.  
  
Gradually, Eriana began to hear her.  
  
Eriana conjured a tower of fire.  
  
The Thrall it touched it killed; the Knights and Acolytes it touched it compelled. They boiled toward the surface, swinging swords, just behind her. She rocketed onto the surface tired and lost, looking at sunlight she hadn’t seen in - how long? Internal diagnostics: three years - and kicked up another tower of fire. She felt the tug of the Oversoul and of the liminal world. The Earth was a green sliver beyond the blue-black sky, and the tug on Eriana’s memory was a sudden burst of terror and loss. Wei Ning, she thought, as she looked at the Earth and burned.  
  
Eris had hidden herself well. She had used Hunter-silence and Hive-creeping to lie flat and turn herself the color of the moon. She had left a message in the edge between the worlds, though, a whisper, a weighted globe of silence where the deathsong might have been. Eriana held it in her hand.  
  
Eriana thought of the holes she could punch in the world, and the ships in the caverns, and her shoulders creaked in their slow breaking, and she thought that she would send her Hands and Hearts and Eyes to hunt the world.  
  
With the thought, the engines of the tombships started.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [End credits.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLI784vUkDU)


End file.
